Bees –October and November 2016
If my bees cannot learn to be at least a little self sufficient I am going to have to give them up. They have turned into a very expensive hobby when what I was looking for was a decent supply of honey. Sure, I want to help pollinators and any plants that need bees to reproduce, but this is ridiculous.
The Russian Queen I installed September 20th in hive #3 is laying well, with lots of capped brood.
Hive #2 was treated for mites with the Apivar strips on the 29th and I drenched the ground for beetle larvae with the Permithrin again. I removed all the bottom screens with the beetle trap trays when larvae stopped showing up in them. Cold weather is coming and I don’t want them drafty.
Feeding Fall Honeybees
All the hives have gotten way too light, as if the bees are eating more honey than they are storing, which is scary going into fall and cold weather. Lots of empty combs all of a sudden, so October 6th I started feeding the 1:1 syrup again. I had removed the top syrup feeders Aug 16th when all the hives seemed full. I Fed them syrup again on October 11th.
On October 28th, another beekeeper came by to help me look at my hives and we went through all six of them, finding two of them with very little brood, one with no brood at all and all of them still way to light in honey. I went and talked with Ed for advice and he suggested feeding them 2:1 syrup and combining two of the hives, using a double screen he lent me, then re-queening the third hive and eventually combining all three, so they have a better chance of making it through the winter.
When I got back home with the replacement queen, and went through them again, they seemed stronger than I remembered, with more brood than I realized at first. So I re-queened the one with no brood (#4) and started heating water to make the heavy syrup.
2:1 Mix
One pot with 12 lbs water (1 ½ gallons) + 24 lbs sugar (6 x 4 lb bags)
One pot with 16 lbs water (2 gallons) + 32 lbs sugar (8 x 4 lb bags)
Note: It dawned on me that I had no idea why lb is the abbreviation for pounds so I Googled it.
{Lb is an abbreviation of the Latin word libra. The primary meaning of libra was balance or scales (as in the astrological sign), but it also stood for the ancient Roman unit of measure libra pondo, meaning “a pound by weight.”}
Once I added double the sugar, the mixture no longer fit in my two largest pots, so I had to ladle half of it out into a five gallon bucket before mixing it all up. Such a heavy concentration of sugar does not dissolve as easily as the 1:1 mix so it was hard to not make a sticky mess all over the kitchen while briskly stirring it all up and then pouring it all into eight one gallon jugs to cool. What a pain.
I fed them every 2-3 days for four feedings and the bees filled their empty honey frames back up. Wouldn’t you think they could find food on their own? I am starting to think that there is just not enough natural forage around here for bees to make it. Corn, soybeans and grass occupy most of the open spaces near here and they do not provide much nectar. (Click on the green link for a list of nectar producing plants.) Maybe I should move them to a wilder area with less farmland, but then it would be harder to find the time to check on them, and bears would be more of an issue. Here, at least I can see them and they are behind a woven wire fence.
The Queen
A week after re-queening, on October 22nd, I went in to remove the cage and found the new queen still inside, with a bunch of other bees. She had not moved into the hive. Bizarre. So, I pried the screen off to let her out and before I could stop her, she flew away! Geesh.
I called Ed again.
“Will she come back?”
He laughed.
“Nope. You’d better come get another one.”
I jumped in my car and headed over to Back Creek and Geezer Ridge. Since she had not ever started laying, he replaced her free of charge, luckily. I came back and installed her.
I waited too long for a warm, non windy day to open the hives back up again and check on her. It was 2 weeks, on November 6th, when I checked all the hives for brood again. I went through and fed them some regular 1:1 syrup mix and gave them each half a pollen patty.
When I got to hive #4 I pulled out the queen cage only to find that, not only was she still in there, the bees had not even chewed through the candy plug to let her out! I should have checked sooner, I know. They can feed her through the screen and she still looked OK, so I carefully released her into the bottom hive and quick covered it back up so she would not fly out.
I do not have high hopes. Talk about discouraged. I am seriously thinking that if I can just get them to somehow make it through winter and pay me back in the spring through selling splits that I might get back out of this bee thing. I have about had it.
-Wendy lee, writing at Edgewisewoods Gardens and Critters